With Aston Villa having an outside chance of breaking into the top four and the billionaire owners at Man City the four Premier League giants might be starting to panic
It’s rare that more than one of the Big Four has a bad weekend. That all should fail to score on the same day, November 24 – with Fulham and Newcastle’s draws at Liverpool and Chelsea, respectively, treated like cup shocks – was a statistical fluke. Nonetheless the fact that the cartel have looked unexpectedly vulnerable at times this season ought to be a cause for celebration, given that their domestic dominance is sapping the life out of the league. Aston Villa’s goalless home draw with Man Utd – greeted by a curious, cricket-derived headline in the Express, Villa’s Bunnies Find Some Bite – might not seem like a sign of changing times given that it simply ended a run of 14 defeats against the same opponents. But it followed on from a comfortable win at Arsenal the previous week and a widespread sense that, finally, here was a club well placed to break into the elite, at the expense of a team being widely derided as “bottlers”.
